Former Mayor Jean Stothert was a guest speaker at the River City Republicans’ luncheon last week. She spoke about the state of the city a little more than a year after she left office in 2025.
“I’ve been at the ball game every day at the College World Series,” Stothert said. “One of the things I love doing is asking people from out of town who have never been here, ‘What do you think of Omaha?’ And I hear two main things all the time: ‘I feel so safe here,’ and ‘It’s so clean here.’”
While Omaha has remained a relatively safe city for a metropolitan area its size, Wednesday last week was an unusually violent day. Six people lost their lives — four in apparent murder-suicides, one in a shooting, and one in a fire. All the deaths are under investigation by the Omaha Police Department.
“Omaha is a safe city with low homicide and violent crime rates. But today is a profoundly sad and difficult one,” Omaha Mayor John W. Ewing Jr. and Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said in a joint statement. “This time last year, there were nine homicides. Today, we added three names to that list, bringing the total to seven. One loss is too many.”
Stothert believes Ewing is not placing enough focus on crime.
“My first priority for 12 years was public safety, and I said that should be every mayor’s first priority — keeping the city safe,” Stothert said. “His first priority is affordable housing. He doesn’t even have public safety in his list of priorities.”
Councilwoman Aimee Melton agreed.
“I’m pretty sure a College World Series team’s bus probably never got robbed with your man. Just saying,” she said, referring to an incident over the weekend in which $35,000 worth of photography equipment was stolen from the Troy University baseball team’s bus.
Both Stothert and Melton credited Omaha’s relatively low crime rate to the efforts of law enforcement, including Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine. Kleine has served as county attorney for 20 years and is up for reelection. Melton warned that his potential replacement would not be a change for the better.
“We cannot lose Don Kleine,” Melton said. “I can tell you we will start seeing low bonds. We will start seeing cases getting dismissed. I think you’ll also probably see an exodus of a lot of the deputy county attorneys that have been there for years.”
Stothert also warned Republicans not to take any election for granted. She cited her 2006 race for state senate against Steve Lathrop as an example.
“I lost on a recount of provisional ballots by 14 votes,” Stothert said. “So when people say, ‘My vote doesn’t count, oh gee, I’m not going to come out and vote’ — oh my goodness. In Omaha, the voter turnout was 27%. That drives me crazy, because every vote does count.”
